DIANE ACKERMAN

TWILIGHT OF THE TENDERFOOT: A Western Memoir

The landscape of one's heart's desire. For Diane
Ackerman, it is the American West, the life and land of the cowboy,
that excites her imagination and her naturalist's passion for the
earth.

An
adventurer determined to realize her dream, she sets out from the
East and the relative security of academe to live on a New Mexico
cattle ranch where cowboying goes on as it has for ages. As
soon as she arrives at the Tequesquite ranch, she pulls on her
boots and gets down to work: riding herd; wrestling, branding, and
delivering calves; mixing easily with the cowboys. Even as time
passes, she is continually amazed to find herself "out on the
prairie where there are no walls... riding freely across the range
in the same mythic West that salted my childhood with its
six-shooting cowboys and burly desperadoes..."

As
a tenderfoot — and a woman in a man's world
— she undergoes an often hilarious initiation; but
she is game and spirited and altogether up to the challenges of
red-hot chiles, Red Man chewing tobacco, revved-up horses, snakes
dangling from brooms, and backbreaking work well before sunrise.

Diane Ackerman captures the cowboy's swiftly vanishing way of life
in vital, exuberant prose. Only a writer of her stature could
render so vividly a wold as familiar as the Marlboro Man's and as
exotic as Mars, a place where "Civilization doesn't exactly
disappear; it just seems beside the point."

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

"When Diane Ackerman wonders, her eyes go wide as chuckwagon chow
plates; when she thinks, her brain flashes like a panhandle sky in
storm. Because she knows the land of the heart, she's exquisitely
rendred the heart of this land." — Albert
Goldbarth

"She brings a proud, disciplined, lyrical intelligence to the
western ranch experience which is unique for any American,
especially an academic. Altogether an unexpected piece of
high-bucking prose..." — Seymour Krim

Poet Ackerman (The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral) spent a few weeks,
on and off, on the Tesquesquite, a vast New Mexican cattle ranch,
in search of the vanishing cowboy, and came up with this
self-absorbed account. She times her seasonal visits to coincide
with such chores as branding and calving, works alongside the men,
and describes both the timeless procedures and the new
technological aids--from tape decks to helicopters--of the cowboy's
trade. But her observations are clouded by romance: all the cowboys
are beautiful, rough, and tough, all their horses "tightly muscled
and meticulously trained." Being a cowboy, it turns out, is very
hard work--dirty, bone-shattering, and endless--but mundane
questions of wages, benefits, and longevity (or why the cowboy
vanishes) are not her concern. She confides some tricks of the
cowboy's trade--such as how to use a horse for a sundial--and often
waxes poetic about the "dramatic" landscape and the "thrill" of
cowboy-watching. But mostly she is concerned with "why on earth
should I come here" among strangers "who baffle easily when I speak
in my normal way." The western terrain--especially the description
of work--is engrossing, but the poet's little condescending sayings
and doings are more tedious than any prairie. — Kirkus
Review

"A
good account of life on a ranch in the Land of Enchantment...
certainly refreshing." — Bruce King, Governor of New
Mexico

"One aspect of this book to admire, once you're through admiring
the courage and zeal of its author, is the language. It is
offered with a poet's touch, which means that words are not
manipulated for the pleasure of fondling them, but for the sake of
getting the experience right, then getting it across in a useful
and memorable way. Ackerman is good at her job, and so we feel the
life of the ranch. As charming as the prose is, so is Ackerman's
gusto exemplary; she is in touch with the roots of American
history, she knows it, and wants to take in as much as she can.
What is stirring in Diane Ackerman's book is that she refuses to be
persuaded by the West's self-generating myths about itself... What
she offers is far from the cliché of Western Hombre and Western
Gal, yet is delicately tinged with our own nostalgia for what we
once believed. She recovers for us what most of us didn't know we
were losing. And therefore she places us significantly in her debt
— for her book's unpretentious fun, for her
gently-offered insights, for the pleasure of her language and her
company." — Frederick Busch